Wireless devices, such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, desktops and other devices employ operating systems and/or applications that present a user with a graphic user interface that includes icons of multiple wireless networks such as multiple cellular networks and/or wireless access points such as WiFi wireless access points, that are within range of the wireless device. By way of example, some conventional operating systems or software applications only illustrate the signal strength as part of a cellular or WiFi icon for multiple networks along with a lock icon indicating whether the wireless access point (WAP) requires a password, a network name and an indication of which network is connected. However, such iconography does not typically illustrate how fast the network is in terms of throughput bandwidth or quality without first connecting to the network and performing speed tests. Requiring the wireless device to perform a speed test is extremely costly to compute, using battery life and takes additional time during a wireless access point connection process.
In other conventional examples, a graphic user interface with WAP iconography is employed to illustrate both signal strength and data speed (i.e., bandwidth in Mbps or Gbps) but do so in a confusing manner such that users are unable to adequately determine the best potential network. Typically, wireless network access point status or quality indication systems provide inadequate indications of both network signal strength and data speed because the data speed is actually indicative of simply the data speed between the wireless device and the wireless access point. However, the data speed of an end-to-end link from the user device to the content source providing the content being uploaded or downloaded can be much different than the speed to the user device to the WAP. Such inaccurate techniques result in poor user experiences and can result in connection to an undesirable network.